


A Welcome Vacation

by tomato_greens



Series: Guesthouse Best House [2]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Addiction, For additional warnings please read the author’s notes, Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2019-10-31 21:14:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17857043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: “We should really bring the kids to see a Western Conference game for once,” Jack muses after sex one night.(Parenting, the toils of travel, importantly angular architecture, paintings of embarrassingly handsome men, alone time, the year 2039, hockey, and stuffed pizza: the Bittle-Zimmermanns go to Chicago!)





	1. 8 JAN 2039 8:32 AM

**Author's Note:**

  * For [familiar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/familiar/gifts).



> 1) WARNING: This fic includes sex that I didn't write as nonconsensual but that could read that way, because it's about an intimate relationship that is dysfunctional in many ways, but that serves specific functions. It is also about mental illness, including some descriptions of disturbing intrusive thoughts and mentions of past suicidality, as well as BDSM elements that do not fit easily into the de rigueur SSC or RACK models. 
> 
> I was originally going to post this in a giant block but now I'm experimenting with chapters as a formal thing, so let me know what you think.
> 
> 2) Many thank yous to [Pinkerton](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkerton) who majorly helped me out by betaing the first couple chapters!
> 
> 3) I started this story last year while visiting [familiar](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/familiar), whom I never would have met without _Check Please!_ and who is an incredibly gracious host. 
> 
> 4) Julia Nunes moved to LA to become a cool stoner and traaaagically took down all of her old vids and records, but the fic title is from [a song from her 2008 album _I Wrote These_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3i7-x3IZGI). [The lyrics are probably relevant.](https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858705110/)

“We should really bring the kids to see a Western Conference game for once,” Jack muses after sex one night as Bitty putters about the room, washing the vibrator and drying it vigorously with a washcloth, wrapping the ballgag in its soft green cloth and hiding it in the bottom drawer of the dresser nestled between manacles and the paddle they haven’t really used since before the kids were born. “Got to get them seeing different styles of play if Michel is going to join the Mite team next year.” 

“They’ve seen Western Conference teams play before, Jack,” Bitty says, his shoulders shifting unreadably. His back is to Jack, as it often is, and Jack contemplates the comfortable knob of his neck, upon which Jack has rested his hand many times. “We saw the Sharks play the Falcs when we went to visit the Chows two years ago.”

“But they haven’t seen a Western Conference team at a home game,” Jack points out. Bitty closes the drawer and stands up. From the back he still looks eighteen, which Jack likes: it’s like time travelling within the familiar stripe of his own history. “It’s different to see a team on their home turf. You know, where they’re comfortable.” 

“The Sharks won, so I don’t think they were too uncomfortable,” Bitty says tartly, pulling on pajama pants and swatting Jack over until he gives up more of the mattress, but the next morning when Jack shuffles downstairs at nine, Bitty waves him towards the wall-mounted kitchen tablet and points to the Pinterest boards he’s pulled together: Dallas, Chicago, LA.

“I don’t want to go to LA,” Jack protests as Bitty hands him a mug of coffee and shoves his neon yellow and blue pill case over the breakfast bar. The coffee is steaming, too hot to swallow pills with, so Jack pours out Monday morning into his palm and considers its contents—Cymbalta, Buspar, Risperdal, Vyvanse, vitamin D and a mysterious horse pill concoction that Bitty buys for $60 a bottle from a company of dubious legality that calls itself LifeExtension. 

“You don’t have to,” Bitty says, pouring coffee out of the thin spout of their carafe. Bitty chose it, of course, as he chose nearly everything in the house, while Jack was somewhere else. “That’s why I gave us options.”

“Where are the kids?” Jack asks, becoming aware as he does so of the cartoon murmur wafting in from the living room. “Oh. I thought we said we weren’t letting them watch TV in the morning on weekends?” 

“You said that.” Bitty pulls a plate out of the cupboard, one of the small plastic IKEA ones that he usually gives the kids but occasionally serves food on to Jack when he thinks Jack needs some portion control now that he doesn’t spend two thirds of the year playing professional hockey. “I said, we’ll see. And it’s impossible for me to put together breakfast when they’re running around in here. I don’t think a forty-year-old SpongeBob rerun is going to hurt them too much.” The yellow eggs and red strawberries contrast well with the turquoise blue of the plate; Bitty arranges everything like he’s going to photograph it. 

“Ophélie is only just at grade level in reading. She should be working on real chapter books.” Jack sprinkles pepper on the eggs—Bitty only rarely allows him salt, and Jack knows better than to ask for it on breakfast. “Toast?”

“You can walk over here and get it from the toaster if you want it,” Bitty says from where he’s assembling the kids’ plates with their own little piles of eggs and strawberries. “You could try avocado instead of butter for once.”

“I keep telling you, I don’t like the texture of avocado.”

“And being at grade level is normal. Normal is fine! Normal is good! Everyone’s life is easier if they’re normal! O’s allowed to enjoy something once in a while, you know, she’s nine years old. Let her watch some TV.”

Jack decides he wants the toast, which is peeking up from the toaster and studded with healthful sprouted grains. “We have to start developing their work ethics early.”

“Maybe she just doesn’t like those Little House on the Big Plum books you got her. Paper copies, Jack, really? They’ll disintegrate.”

“They’ve been best-selling children’s literature for a century.”

“So they’re old.” Bitty sighs and puts the butter dish in Jack’s reach. “Old things are boring.” 

“Old things are classic,” Jack argues, and take a pat of butter and the toast back to his plate at the breakfast bar. The coffee’s cooled enough to take his pills, so he gulps them down in two swallows except for the Vyvanse, which he isn’t likely to need today. “Where are the kids eating?”

“Where they eat every morning.” At Jack’s expectant silence, Bitty rolls his eyes. “Their table.”

It’s actually a nice table, easy to clean, with the alphabet printed along the outside rim of the surface. Next year, Ophélie will almost certainly be too tall for it, though Michel is only five and happy there still. “Are you going to let them watch TV while they eat?”

“We’ll see,” Bitty says, and walks out of the room with loaded plates and cups of 2% milk expertly tucked into his hands and the crooks of his elbows. The exaggerated sound effects don’t stop, though they do lower enough to be on the edge of Jack’s aging hearing. He’ll probably be deaf by the time he’s eighty; he keeps meaning to look into sign language. Maybe next week. Bitty’s eyes and ears are as sharp as ever, though he’s starting to worry about wrinkles seriously enough that he’s talked about Botox and the line of skin care products in their bathroom has tripled over the past five years. 

Jack doesn’t care too much about his wrinkles, which he’s always thought made his dad look distinguished and which he expects to lend him the same air of gravity and wisdom. He swipes the kitchen tablet back on and Pinterest pops up obediently. The Blackhawks are doing well this season, he knows, better than the Stars, plus, despite his best attempts otherwise, he’s never enjoyed his time in the South—it’s always too hot and it always seems in some fundamental way foreign to him, of a separate lineage. 

“I bought Blackhawks tickets,” he tells Bitty when Bitty comes back at last into the kitchen with the kids’ empty plates. “I thought I should go ahead and get them while there were still good seats available.”

“I guess we’re going to Chicago,” Bitty says, and finally makes himself a plate of eggs. He doesn’t even microwave them warm again, just douses them in hot sauce and eats over the sink. 

“You want the rest of my toast?” Jack asks, holding out his last quarter-piece.

“You know I’m not eating carbs right now,” Bitty snaps, then visibly reconsiders as he looks at Jack’s outstretched arm. “Well, maybe one bite.” He comes over and puts a hand around Jack’s wrist, steadying it, and bites into the toast with an audible crunch. Jack can feel Bitty’s jaw work through the second skin-sense that develops with a long and intimate association. “Fuck, I forgot you took the butter,” Bitty groans, no doubt in melancholy about the hypothetical loss of his as-yet-trim figure, but despite that, he takes a second bite. Jack watches his Adam’s apple bob and imagines biting it, gentle nips, like a cat or something. As Bitty releases him, the bite turns involuntarily in his mind’s eye into a predatory ripping, a killing blow. 

A few years ago, this would have been Jack’s cue to flip out: yell, throw a plate, take a benzo, try to kill himself, all admittedly problematic solutions but the only ones that ever occurred to him in situ. In the end, Bitty packed the kids into the back of the car, packed Jack into the front, switched on automated steering and braking, and refused to talk or uncross his arms until he kicked Jack out at Silver Lake Recovery ninety minutes south of Providence. “I’m going to my mother’s,” he’d explained, handing Jack a duffel out of the trunk of the car. “I’ll call you when I get back.” 

Jack took the duffel bag and dully watched their gray hatchback zoom away, wishing absently for a Klonopin but knowing instinctively that Bitty would not have packed him any. Jack had been exiled to the guesthouse on their property for the better part of two years, except for a brief respite preceding and following Michel’s birth, and it didn’t feel strange or unexpected or even disappointing to be kicked to the curb; it just felt inevitable. Silver Lake was predictably terrible, with its kidney-shaped pool and its meditation room and its bug-eyed art therapist, but the only way Jack could get out of there was to shape up. Eventually, with the threat of another stupid oil pastel drawing hanging over him, he said all the right things. As it turned out, they were the precisely the same things he’d had to say when he was nineteen years old, so the whole thing could have been avoided if Jack hadn’t been too fucked up on Klonopin to remember. But he had been; that was the point. 

Jack doesn’t take benzos anymore, limited to a less tempting palate of SNRIs and antipsychotics—they aren’t as good, but he’s allowed to live inside his own home, eat the breakfast his husband makes for him, plan family vacations. There’s no point in questioning it now. He made the trade already. Jack backs away, mentally, from the image of Bitty’s torn-open throat; instead of blowing a gasket, he breathes out, tries to gently dig out the imager from his head, let it float down into the frozen pond he put together as a visualization with his therapist. He slips under the ice himself for a second. The world recedes. He surfaces; Bitty swims back into his focus, unhurt and talking again: “Jack? Jack? Did you check if the hypertrain line has been unveiled yet, or are we going to have to take a plane?”

“I don’t know,” Jack manages to rasp, not yet entirely unfrozen. 

“I don’t think the Chicago line opens until next year,” Bitty mutters, chewing on his lower lip as he wipes his hands off on a kitchen towel and stands in a conflicted posture in front of the kitchen tablet. “We’ll have to see if UniteDelt has reasonable flights. I don’t know how well Michel is going to like that,” he warns. “Or how well you’re going to take it, for that matter.”

“I don’t mind planes that much. Anyway, what about you and Ophélie?” 

“We’re always fine, we’re adaptable,” Bitty says firmly. “O’s most like me. You know, in that way.” In fact Ophélie is in many ways unlike either of them, being genetically unrelated to both Jack and Bitty, but Jack has to concede the point—in matters of pragmatism, Ophélie is firmly Bitty’s child where Michel is clearly Jack’s. “We’ll have to take business class, though, Jack, I refuse to pay first class rates for anyone under eighteen years old.”

“We could just leave them with a stewardess,” Jack suggests, but even as he says it he knows it has to be a joke; Bitty would never fly without easy access to his children, so he can wipe up their dirty cheeks and make sure they’re representing the Bittle name, and besides, what would anyone think of him as a father if he abandoned his children to some bimbo in outdated pumps? That’s what Bitty would say; Jack knows because he’s said it before. “Okay, okay. Business class. The accountant will be thankful about that, anyway.”

“There are supposed to be tax deductions for hypertrain tickets you buy in advance of the line opening,” Bitty says. “We should plan a vacation in advance, for once.”

“But what if we changed our minds between when we booked it and when we went?” 

“We would just have to learn to deal with that, wouldn’t we,” Bitty replies, taking Jack’s empty plate and brushing off the crumbs into the sink Dispose-It-All before he puts it in the dishwasher. “Well, you already bought the Blackhawks tickets, you might as well get the plane and the hotel.”

“You don’t want to choose them with me?”

“I’ve got other things to do,” Bitty says, waving to encompass the minor disorder of the kitchen, the sounds of the kids, the caretaking of the house and lawn, which has always been his dominion more than it’s ever been Jack’s, though sometimes Bitty makes Jack take his shirt off and mow the grass. “You can take care of this, can’t you?”


	2. 10 MARCH 2039

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) This is, of course, assuming we haven't killed the earth and everything on it by 2039; WARNINGS mentioned in the last chapter continue to apply.
> 
> 2) There's some French in this story that I went back and forth on translating. I ended up not adding translations because I'm experimenting and I also just read Anzaldúa for the first time, but if you need anything clarified, ask and ye shall receive. 
> 
> 3) I love con crit, so given the conversation about criticism that has been going around fandom in recent months, please feel free to take all the criticism that other people very understandably don't want and pile it onto this story!

Chicago is the architectural capital of the U.S. and, arguably, the world, according to the WikiTravel articles Jack read in preparation of their trip, but it’s hard to tell that from the airport, which, other than one undulating multicolored neon sculpture over an old-fashioned moving sidewalk, isn’t especially architecturally interesting from the inside.

“They really ought to revamp this airport,” Bitty hisses, one hand grabbing protectively into Michel’s shirt collar and the other hand on Ophélie’s shoulder. Jack, of course, is minding their three suitcases, one for Bitty, one for Jack and the kids, one empty for presents to bring back for Bitty’s mother, his cousins’ children, favored members of the PTA, and the two different sets of neighbors who Bitty finds acceptable to invite to dinner parties. Back when Jack had coworkers, Bitty would usually try to find some kind of en masse gustatory experience that he could buy in a sack and distribute regardless of, and usually contrary to, the team nutritionist’s approval, and afterwards would wait patiently while Jack investigated the dusty back rooms of antique stores. Now Bitty hurries the whole family through the antiques before taking away the joint credit card and buying small, gleaming treasures from boutiques so small and delicate that Jack feels like he might accidentally Hulk through them if he breathes in too deeply. 

“I like it,” Ophélie declares stoutly. She’s taken, lately, to contradicting Bitty, the louder and more publically the better, but Jack doesn’t know what to do about it and, for once, neither does Bitty seem to. She’s getting older; soon she’ll get her period, and Jack doesn’t know what they’ll talk about after that. “Aren’t the colorful blocks on the wall pretty, Michel?”

Michel is looking at his feet, as he usually is, and barely glances at the brightly lit wall before shrugging noncommittally and looking back down at his miniature black sneakers—often the only pair of shoes he’ll wear, to Bitty’s frustration, who thinks he looks more presentable in boat shoes or loafers. 

“Ben, fais attention, c’est joli, non?” Ophélie continues, impatient.

“Okay,” Michel says, clearly as a final judgment rather than in acknowledgment of Ophélie’s point, more interested in his shoes and the texture of the moving sidewalk than in his sister’s opinions. 

“That was commissioned from an artist named Michael Hayden,” Jack remembers from one of the WikiTravel articles. “Way before either of you were born.”

“That’s like your name, Michel,” Ophélie says, switching back to English, which she prefers to speak outside of the house.

“J’suis Michel.”

“That’s the English version of your name, honey,” Bitty says, navigating both kids off the moving sidewalk as Jack stumbling lay gathers two suitcases in his left hand and one in his right a little too late. “Michael is the same name as Michel.”

“Non, j’suis Michel,” Michel insists, breath coming hard like he’s thinking about crying. He’s too old for tantrums, but sometimes they come on like storms whipped up over open water, unpredictable and usually devastating. “Pas Michael! C’est pas moi, Michael!” 

“Si,” Ophélie contradicts him, and Jack’s not sure if it’s meant to be cruel but that’s clearly how Michel finds it, because his face crumples in on itself. 

“Honey, honey,” Bitty says, but Michel’s beyond listening; he doesn’t actually have tears coming out of his eyes but he’s wrapped his arms around himself and retreated from the unmanageable world, concentrating fiercely down at his Velcro straps. Bitty thinks he’s old enough to have laces—Ophélie jumped on the chance to tie her own shoes—but Michel has trouble remembering which loops go where in order to make sure the laces can be untied again. After picking through the third Gordian knot, Bitty decided to postpone that fight in favor of others, but Jack knows he’s still bothered by what he considers Michel’s slow development. 

Michel doesn’t seem so slow to Jack, though he is going to have to work on his hand-eye coordination if he wants to play hockey with any success next year. “Tout va bien,” Jack says to Michel, putting a hand on Michel’s tense little shoulder. “Michel, tu m’entends?”

Michel doesn’t answer as Bitty herds them onto the next moving sidewalk, or as they make their way through the thronging clutch of spandexed, jetlagged humanity and end up pushed out into Arrivals, or as Bitty realizes first that Jack planned for them to take the El to their AirBnB and then that they’re going to be staying at an AirBnB rather than at a hotel and subsequently has to sit down and visibly consider poaching a stranger’s e-cig before he’s ready to venture forward. “Okay,” Bitty says, grimly, determinedly cheerful, “okay,” and finally as they all prepare to head to the El platform, Michel briefly catches Jack’s eye; “Okay,” Michel says, too. 

Like most of the lowspeed rail Jack has been on in his life, the El hasn’t received a significant infrastructure upgrade in fifty years or more, but when he doesn’t think about the statistics of derailment he likes that because it makes him feel as the back of Bitty’s neck does, suddenly hurtled back towards his own beginnings—a pleasant lurch out of the digital present into the analogue past. The El passes are easy enough to buy, and Ophélie and Michel, children of the cushy motor vehicle, both get a kick out of the concrete platform and metal benches, on which they promptly start climbing.

“Our children are animals,” Bitty mutters sourly, but then he sends Jack a crinkle-eyed look, like he’s starting to understand why Jack wanted them all to wait here for a train that will expose them to the watery April sunlight instead of rushing from the cold recycled air of the plane to the warm recycled air and tinted windows of a car to the sterile air of a high-class hotel; Jack stomach catches in a spark at that look. The other problem with hotels is how rarely the beds have sturdy slatted headrests. 

The wait isn’t too long before a train opens its doors and they shuffle on in a clattering pile of luggage and coats, Bitty once again clamped onto Michel’s shirt collar and Ophélie’s hand in case any of the unwashed creeps around them decide to put their child-sized suitcases to nefarious use. Bitty is constantly protecting the children from statistically unlikely harm, an instinct that Jack envies—Jack is usually too busy trying to protect them from himself to remember that bad people exist in a general way as well as in the familial specific. 

“It’s just a few stops,” he says over Michel’s bowed head. “We’ll get off at Logan Square.”

“That’s ten stops,” Ophélie says, characteristically unhelpful, pointing at the transit map posted above the door. She’s straining at Bitty’s arm, already demanding: here I am! here’s what I see! She must get it from Bitty, or maybe it was genetically passed down from Krystal, the kids’ mother, who after all was precocious enough to have her first baby as a sophomore in high school. That’s only a few years away, for Ophélie; she’s more than halfway there. “And then it’s seven stops from there to get downtown.” 

“What a central location your papa picked for us,” Bitty says, though he’s starting to sound more worn out than irritated. He shakes her hand in a rough little gesture, pulling her back towards him. “Don’t point, honey. It’s rude.” 

“Okay.” Ophélie then gently smacks Michel in the arm and immediately points out the window. “Hey, look where we’re going!” 

Michel rubs his arm, but lifts his head agreeably enough, taking in the rush of cars and concrete-gray landscape, the bare trees, the clouded sponge of sky. “Illinois,” he says.

“Duh, that’s where Chicago is,” Ophélie retorts, rolling her eyes, but as Jack looks out he can see what Michel means in the glinting texture of unfamiliar license plates. 

Ten stops is, it turns out, no time at all, and soon they’re tumbling in a sea of luggage and children and Bitty’s sour little huffs out onto the platform. Jack’s first time in Chicago had been around April, too, and in the few minutes he’d spent shuffling between the arena and the hotel he’d seen hopeful buds on trees, breathed in the distinct scent of spring-warming air. Now, the air is snappingly cold. But that’s the way of things; the seasons have been shifting little by little since Jack’s early twenties, despite the yearly attempt to reach an international Climate Accord. Michel and Ophélie might never understand what spring meant to Jack when he was their ages. He hates it, but that’s how it is.

He checks the screen of his watch, which is vibrating with directional information he’d set into it days ago. “This way,” he says, and as a family they climb off the platform, down a sidewalk, past one set of townhouses—“Not yet,” Jack is forced to announce when Bitty, Ophélie, and Michel all make inquiring noises at once—and then past another, until his watch beeps in a self-satisfied tritone and he can finally let go of the three suitcases for a minute and say, “Here we are.”

Ophélie lets out a whoop, tears free from Bitty’s grasp, and catches Michel around the shoulder for a moment before he shrugs her off. “Do I get my own room?” she asks, climbing up the front steps before Jack can look around for the key or the owner, whichever appears first. “Does Michel have to sleep on the couch? Is there a couch?”

“It looks nice,” Bitty admits, though his voice still holds dubious multitudes. “More private than a hotel, though I suppose that’s the price to pay when there’s no maid service. You’ll help Daddy clean up after yourselves, won’t you?” Bitty asks Ophélie and Michel, who both nod obediently while still managing to look completely uninterested in anything he says. It’s a moot point, anyway. Bitty never allows anyone to help him in any domestic task, not for longer than it takes for him to look over, sigh lingeringly, and remove the cleaning implement from their well-meaning hand. “What are we waiting for, Jack, can we get in or can’t we?”

“I can’t leave the suitcases alone to get the key,” Jack explains. “If I let go, they’ll tip over.”

“For Godsake, you’ve got to tell me these things,” Bitty says, rubbing the bridge of his nose as he comes close to Jack. He puts out his other hand, ostensibly for a suitcase handle but briefly meeting Jack’s waist before he gets there, little hot points that Jack can feel through his jacket and T-shirt. “Don’t I take care of you when you need me?” 

Jack clears his throat. 

“You take care of all of us, Daddy,” Ophélie pipes up from where she’s swinging on the front stair bannister.

Like that, it’s over. Bitty removes his hand and puts its squarely on the souvenir suitcase. “Get down from there, O,” he orders, barely glancing over at her. “It’s not safe. And if you break it, it’s not ours.”

“I’m not heavy enough to break it,” Ophélie retorts, though she carefully climbs back down to the sidewalk. 

“Come on, Jack,” Bitty snaps. “Please let us inside before the kids kill themselves and the owners sue us for, you know, endangerment or emotional distress or something.”

It’s the frozen pond conundrum again—though, when isn’t it the frozen pond conundrum? Jack imagines a pickaxe in his hand and boots with spiked soles. “Okay,” he says, his mouth moving sluggishly against the natural and ever-present tension in his jaw. It’s why he prefers to speak French, after all these years; the slackness of English, the way the vowels sit complacently in the middle of his mouth instead of shuttling pucklike between his throat and teeth, still feels alien to him. “Give me a second.” 

His hand feels huge as he fumbles with the stupid touchscreen of the watch, last year’s birthday present. “I finally couldn’t avoid giving you one, they’re just too useful and besides they’ve been around for twenty years,” Bitty had said, tugging the clasp closed before biting the web between Jack’s left thumb and forefinger hard enough to leave marks. 

“This is so you can track me,” Jack had said.

“Yes,” Bitty’d replied, unashamed. “You’d better wear it, or else you know what’s coming to you—and not the kind you like.”

In the present, Jack swipes through e-mails, forces himself to pull the uneven pendulum of his bodyweight through the brisk air as he looks through the small garden and finds the key underneath a premature ornamental cabbage, climbs the stairs, fits the key roughly into the lock—probably scratching it, God—and opens the door. A mountain of a task, really, when it’s broken down into its components. 

“Merci, Papa!” Ophélie yells, racing past him. Bitty grabs Michel’s shirt collar once again and begins towing him towards the house, until Michel ducks suddenly, wrests his shirt free, and runs up the stairs after Ophélie, his own “Merci!” flung at Jack, echoing in a microcosmic Doppler effect.

“They’re going to kill us,” Bitty mutters, grabbing the empty suitcase and hauling it behind him.

“You don’t have to—I can carry it all.”

“I don’t want you to strain yourself,” Bitty says, a little mean so that the spark in Jack’s stomach pulses hot and then cold again.

“I won’t,” Jack promises, but by then Bitty is already setting the suitcase down, headed after their children’s skittering footsteps. Alone in front hall, Jack grits his teeth to pull the key out of the door—it zips unpleasantly against the inside of the lock—and drops it in the bowl the house’s owner has left thoughtfully on the sideboard, a dark nineteenth-century piece with beat-up dentil molding between its scratched surface and its weirdly spindly legs. Jack wonders whether the women who own the house purchased it or nabbed it from bulk trash pickup. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

“Jack!” Bitty calls from one of the bedrooms, having evidently set the children up in front of the TV, since Ophélie is sitting on the back of the couch and Michel is looking through one of dogeared early readers. Jack gathers the baggage in his hands, which after all are bigger than anyone else’s, and dumps them in a corner before following Bitty’s voice into the bedroom. As usual, he isn’t sure what he’ll find there, but Bitty doesn’t even look angry, or anyway not angrier than he usually looks; he’s gotten Botox twice but didn’t go early enough for preventative care, and there’s a faint, permanent dent between his eyebrows that eventually deepens back into a crease. 

“This is actually pretty good,” Bitty says, reaching one hand out to the bed’s headrest, no longer crackling with starched-collar disapproval.

“Thanks,” Jack says, feeling suddenly shy. “I looked for the right things.”

Stalking towards him, Bitty says, “At first I wasn’t sure about this—I still might not want to cook dinner.”

“You don’t have to cook dinner. I’ll buy dinner.”

“Yeah, you will, with that fat wallet of yours,” Bitty agrees, coming up to squeeze Jack’s back pocket. It isn’t where Jack keeps his wallet—his credit card limit is too high for him to feel comfortable keeping his wallet anywhere without a zipper—but it fits the scene he can feel Bitty building in his head, back when they were asshole kids and Jack’s father got his accountant to file Jack’s newly complex taxes. “You’ll buy whatever I tell you to buy.”

“Yeah,” Jack breathes onto Bitty’s approaching mouth.

A squeal rips into the room, then a telltale tumbling crash and the inevitable cry of pain. “Daddy!” Ophélie calls, followed by Michel’s plaintive “Papa!”

“I don’t think vacation is good for children,” Bitty says, an inch from Jack’s face, his hands like claws in Jack’s back pockets. He draws away; Jack follows helplessly, but Bitty waves him off. “Not like this,” he says, and stomps back out into the room, Michel’s wails growing fainter as he sets them both to rights. “Papa, j’veux Papa!” Michel yells. Jack has to breathe out to release the tension from his traps and remind himself why they didn’t have children when he still spent half the year in artificially silent hotel rooms. 

In the end, it’s a minor disaster, the only casualty Michel’s knee, striped painfully but recoverably by couch-burn. Michel, once he’s launched himself into Jack’s arms, refuses to move. “Fine,” Bitty says, at last, “we’re going to go buy lunch, and Papa’s going to have to feed you like a baby. Is that what you want? To be a baby?”

Michel shrugs, his little shoulders eloquent. 

“Okay, you’re a baby, then,” Bitty says, rolling his eyes, and uses the voice recognition on Jack’s watch to Google a restaurant for lunch.

According to the various sites Jack consulted, Chicago either has a rich culinary history that informs its modern gastronomic experimentation, or it’s full of stodgy wursts, weird pizza, admittedly excellent paczki, and a serious case of the wannabes. But walking back to the El and taking the line down into the Loop at the center of the city, Michel still sniffling in his arms while Ophélie stares big-eyed as the buildings grow taller and taller, Jack thinks he’s rarely seen a city more comfortable with its own unwieldy arteries. As far as Jack can tell, New York can’t stand who it thinks it was five minutes ago, L.A. fears future sun damage, Vegas gives him such a blackout migraine that he’s never been able to get a handle on it, and Providence, the city Jack knows and loves best, still doesn’t like to admit they’d elect Buddy Cianci all over again if given half a chance.

They probably should have made reservations at a restaurant getting as much press as + & -, but Jack’s black Amex and a light lunch crowd pave the way to a table closer to the window than the kitchen. The kids look smaller and rounder-eyed than they have the whole trip thus far, even Ophélie silent, for once, as she takes in the high ceilings and the crisply-suited clientele. 

“This is a nice place, so y’all keep behaving,” Bitty hisses as they sit down. “That means napkins in your laps, and no spilling. If you need help drinking water because the glass is too heavy, Michel, you better let me know.”

Ophélie places the cloth napkin in her lap quickly, but Michel picks his up and his face immediately crumples.

“Oh, no, mister,” Bitty’s saying, but Jack touches his own napkin and sees the problem: the texture’s all wrong, a slick, treated cotton of the type that neither Jack nor Michel can stand. Jack plucks the napkin out of Michel’s grip and spreads it safely on his lap. “Ton pantalon te protège,” Jack whispers to Michel, who still looks unhappy but doesn’t burst into one of his fits. “Ça va aller, hein?”

“Good job,” Bitty says. Jack’s not sure who he’s talking to. 

Ophélie is inspecting the menu with a keen-eyed look she definitely got from Bitty’s side of the family, while Michel fiddles with his small bread plate in a way that spells future disaster, not that Jack can do anything about that. The entrées are essentially indecipherable, a list of mysterious ingredients that Jack knows he should recognize from his years of sitting in fine restaurants but that he does not (c’est quoi un sunchoke?). Bitty will probably like it, whether it tastes good or not. Though he’d never admit it, Bitty’s expertise really begins and ends in cuisine that is in its Platonic form chiefly composed of lard; beyond the realm of the midcentury Southern housewife, Bitty tends to respond more to dishes’ Instagrammability—not that Instagram’s been around since the 2025 panic, but old social media loyalties run deep—than their flavor profiles. Of course, despite Bitty’s best efforts, Jack still doesn’t know enough about food to understand flavor profiles or the aesthetics of plating. 

“Nothing with foam, nothing fermented,” Bitty says over the kids’ head to Jack. “I don’t know how they’d handle it.” 

An easy out, or has Bitty forgotten that Jack also hates foamed microgreens and pickled soursop? “Sure,” Jack says. “Pasta, maybe.”

“They make it by hand, not that that’s too hard for anyone with access to the food channel in the past fifty years. But I’m not eating carbs, remember? So we’ll have to try a few different things.”

Ophélie says, “What’s a sunchoke? We should try that!”

Jack hasn’t figured out what a sunchoke is in the past five minutes, and Bitty doesn’t respond, either unsure himself or in one of his moods. “Why don’t you look it up,” Jack suggests, reaching into his pocket.

“No phones at the table,” Bitty reminds them all, serene. 

Ophélie’s face turns ugly with frustration for a moment, but she manages to smooth out her forehead before Bitty catches her and warns her about future wrinkles. “I’ll look it up later.”

“You can tell your papa all about it,” Bitty says, still focused on the menu, one hand gently removing Michel’s hand from his arm. “I’m sure he’ll love hearing it.”

“Will you, Papa?” Ophélie asks, turning to Jack. 

And what is Jack to say to the little worried creases in her forehead? “Why not?” He knows he could still fit her whole head in the palm of his hand, just like when she was a newborn, cradle her or crush her. According to Google, even children’s skulls are sturdier than than concrete, and his therapist has assured him that children are very resilient, but Jack is skeptical: both Michel and Ophélie are very, very small. 

Bitty ends up ordering for all of them, and a strange amalgamation of dishes come to the table a little while later: a large bowl of house-made ditalini with pea shoots and lemon, the pasta streaked black with squid ink—Bitty sniffs, “What, is this 1994?”, though since Bitty was born in 1995, Jack isn’t sure what that’s supposed to mean; weirdly colorful root vegetables braised with fennel and scattered with crushed pistachio; slivers of mushroom perched on a whip of yogurt, under which are mysterious fleshy lumps that Bitty says are chicken thighs; pinkish fish striped with greenish sauce, which Bitty pulls over to himself, clearly uninterested in sharing; uncertain items fried in pale golden tempura coats. 

“C’est une carotte?” Michel asks, pointing to a purple spear on the vegetable plate and waiting for Jack to nod, though Jack isn’t sure, before he takes it in hand and bites down.

“Michel,” Bitty says, dangerously, and Michel narrows his eyes, throwing another look at Jack before he puts the theoretical carrot back on his little plate. “We wait for adults to serve themselves first, don’t we always?”

Michel’s expression becomes mutinous, but it’s true: that’s one of Bitty’s rules. Frustrated or not, hungry or not, if there’s one thing Michel abides by, it’s the law by precedent. Since Bitty is usually the one with a serving spoon in his hand, the typical order of operations is Jack, Ophélie, Michel, then Bitty last, but as with many of Bitty’s parenting techniques, the theory is more important than the practice. “Jack, come on, the kids are waiting,” Bitty prompts him, just as Jack realizes that Bitty’s not going to portion out the food this time; Jack stuffs himself back into his body, at least enough to operate his hands, and dumps trailing piles onto his plate before Bitty takes over to neatly deposit a chicken thigh and a tidy scoop of pasta in front of each kid. Eminently Instagrammable, or it would have been. Jack’s never learned how to do it like that. 

Bitty hunches over his fish, his wrists at elegant angles but otherwise uninterested in the table; Michel never talks during meals, and Jack can’t think of anything to say. If he and the kids were alone (God forbid, but it’s happened) he could ask Ophélie about school, or Michel about his drawings, but when Bitty’s there it only becomes more obvious that Jack has to ask those questions because he’s the uninvolved parent. He never promised himself anything about the kind of father he’d be, growing up, because he could never imagine himself in the position to have children, not as a boy who figured out that he liked dick in 2003 and then promptly, purposefully, vengefully forgot about it; he hadn’t been thrilled to discover that suddenly being responsible for children saddled with his last name didn’t change anything. If he and Bitty were alone he’d just choke himself on Bitty until the weird tension in the air fizzled to smug satisfaction. Jack’s never been able to figure out what to do, caught between a cock and a hard place, but eat. The food is fine. Tastes like it looks, one step sideways of boring old Americana. 

“Not worth taking home,” Bitty says dismissively when Jack succumbs to Bitty’s dead stare and at last sets down his fork—Michel and Ophélie have been playing with their leftover pieces of chicken skin and indigestible-appearing pieces of cruciferous vegetable for at least fifteen minutes now, and the plates, destroyed, lack even the superficial appeal they had when the waiter carried them out in colorful array. “Guess we’ll have to spring for dinner, too.”

“We can afford it,” Jack says, unsure how else to respond.

“That’s something you’ve always been good for,” Bitty agrees, and they pay the check and go to check out the Loop. It’s gotten colder, a bitter shiver icing its way down down Jack’s trachea and into his bronchi. “N’oublie pas tes moufles,” Jack warns Michel, spying Michel’s bare little fingers start to go red as they make their way through Chicago’s glassy downtown. 

Bitty sends him a hot glare, grabbing Michel, rifling through his pockets for the mittens, and shoving them down onto Michel’s hands. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” he says. 

“—You always do,” Jack says, too late to be an effective balm. Bitty is the most comprehensively competent person Jack has ever met. He always seems to know what to do about everything. The only thing Jack has ever really known how to handle is a stick. 

Bitty knows that, obviously, which is why, a few hours later—the lakeshore having been admired, the Skydeck having been discussed but as yet unvisited, the Aqua building having been first examined and then sniffed at, and the kids having been fed and tucked in—Bitty locks the door to their bedroom and stares Jack down with a little mean eye-squint that makes Jack’s knees unlock. “Tryin’ to undermine me?” Bitty asks, his husky little voice pitched very low. The twang’s thick enough to be a plucked…whatever they pluck in Georgia. Chickens? A banjo string? Jack’s dick? Jack suddenly pictures Bitty pulling out all his pubic hair and has to steady himself on the bedstead. “Tryin’ to get in good with the kids for once?” 

Over the course of their marriage, Jack has learned through trial and error the general patterns of Bitty’s expansive desire. Oh, there are certain constants; he always wants Jack beneath him, one hand wrenched behind his back and panting hard enough he has to beg in gasps—but the specific requirements of Jack’s capitulation change, depending on a variety of unforeseeable factors: Bitty’s mood, the space available, the proximity of their children, how recently Jack’s popped one of the unforgivable pills (three years, eight months, give or take a couple days). Bitty’s whiplash fury isn’t particularly unusual, but outside of the context of their bedroom, and the contents of their private drawers, Jack doesn’t know what to do. “I wouldn’t,” he says uncertainly.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Bitty snorts. “You only care about yourself, isn’t that right? What you want? What you think?” He comes towards Jack, hard, pushes him on the bed, slaps a hand over Jack’s mouth before Jack can try to come up with an acceptable answer—thank God. This is exactly what Jack wants, and what he so rarely gets: yes or no; the immediate gratification of success or failure. Even hockey has more shades of gray than Bitty’s anger. The physics of a pair of handcuffs have less to do with chance than anything involving glorified knife blades and a sheet of ice. “Stay there,” Bitty snaps.

Of course Jack does. Of the things Bitty wants, Jack can give him a full wallet and a willing obedience, wrists that still work well enough despite the surgery the season before Jack’s last. Bitty roots around the suitcase and Jack wonders whether Bitty will let him come. It’s not guaranteed, though since Jack got off benzos it’s been a more regular occurrence. In the grand scheme of their relationship, historically Bitty’s always given rewards for good behavior. 

“Turn around,” Bitty says, then grunts in frustration when Jack turns the wrong way. “No, lengthwise—don’t get your feet on the nice pillows, Jack.” Jack widens his legs a little further, at which point Bitty clamps down on an ankle and secures it to the bedpost with a cuff he must have hidden away in the luggage. Soon enough Jack is spreadeagled and sweating, still fully dressed, as Bitty looks down at him in obvious speculation. “I don’t know,” he says, poking Jack’s side. “You’re going to seed, a lil’ bit. That used to be all muscle right there.” He sticks his fingers into the meat above Jack’s hip, which has a thin layer of subcutaneous fat that didn’t used to exist when Jack was on the other side of forty. “Should I leave you here to think about that?”

Jack hesitates. Bitty jabs him a little harder, so Jack shakes his head.

“No?” Bitty shrugs in his fastidious way, unchanged in some things, despite the wrinkles he hates and the gray hairs he dyes, since he was eighteen years old. “Okay,” he says, easier than Jack would have expected. He pulls the pillows from between Jack’s feet and examines them, at last stripping the sham and cover off one of them before pushing the bare pillow onto Jack’s face.

“Open your mouth,” Bitty orders. 

Everything that Jack owns, except for exercise gear, is 100% cotton; the particular slickness of synthetic blends make him go haywire if he’s not otherwise distracted by physical demands. Bitty knows—Bitty is the one who figured it out, bringing him to a series of boho-artisanal boutiques that Jack hated until he at last threw up his hands and ordered Jack a bunch of Armani T-shirts online. Jack doesn’t know much about fabric but he can tell that the pillow, fine-woven enough that it catches on his facial stubble, is going to feel disgusting if he lets it in his mouth. “No,” he says. Muffled, obviously.

“Excuse me?” Bitty says dangerously.

“I—I don’t want to.”

The weight of the pillow on Jack’s face increases a little as Bitty presses down. “You don’t want to?”

“It’ll taste bad,” Jack offers. “It’s dirty.”

“This is a nice house. It’s not dirty.” 

“It could be.”

“—Open your fucking mouth, Jack.”

Jack considers his options.

“You put in there what I say you put in there and you do not put in what I say you can’t, do you understand me?” Bitty snaps, deeply and echoingly Southern. “No, before you ask, I don’t want you to answer, for Chrissakes. Shut up and suck on this fuckin’ pillow until I tell you stop,” he adds, one hand snaking underneath the pillow to press the hinge of Jack’s jaw until he’s forced to unclench his teeth.

As Bitty unzips his pants and pulls them down around his knees, then pulls his limp arms out of his sleeves like he’s Michel in a tantrum, Jack mouths the stupid pillow. It slides unpleasantly against his front teeth when he tries to bite down. “Ugh,” he says.

“Yes, sometimes that’s how life goes, sweetheart.” Bitty settles down on Jack’s thighs, his knees around Jack’s hips. “I know, baby,” he says, slipping into tenderness, and then puts his mouth on Jack’s limp dick. 

Bitty was embarrassed by blow jobs for the first couple years they were together, but he couldn’t get enough of them: he’d get hot-faced and panting as soon as the lights flipped off, knock Jack’s hands away until the horizon narrowed around Bitty’s mouth and Jack’s cock as the only two living, breathing, pulsing things in the world. A few years into middle age and a lifetime of numbing agents means it’s harder now for Jack—well, to get hard, but Bitty’s fascination with the generative element transcends mere functionality. For Bitty, Jack’s sheer presence rather than the archetypal absence is enough. Or so it seems, anyway, from beneath the pillow.

They don’t get anywhere for a while. Not unusual. Jack never was a naturally early riser, even before the blanketing effects of Risperdal. Bitty takes a break, getting off the bed and rustling around for a while before climbing back on, obviously undressed now. Jack’s shirt is rucked up around his neck, his feet still cuffed to the bedposts and his hands lying deferentially at his sides. “Good job,” Bitty croons, patting Jack’s knee. “But if you don’t get it up soon, I’m going to fuck you up.”

Jack’s body starts trembling outside of his conscious control. It doesn’t feel bad, exactly, or wild as it does during an anxiety attack, more like his nerve endings are shaking out lingering tension and bringing his body along for the ride. Bitty strokes the insides of Jack’s wrists with one hand as he grabs Jack’s flaccid dick with the other. 

“Come on, come on, baby,” Bitty whispers, flicking Jack’s circumcision scar with repeatedly with a fingernail. 

Yeah, yeah, that’s doing—something, that’s shifting the constant heavy weight in the pit of Jack’s stomach further up into his lungs and down into his pelvic bone at the same time. Bitty keeps flicking him, then pinches in one blinding motion the tender point between the base of his dick and his balls. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Bitty says, at which point there’s a gentle knock on the door.

“Daddy,” Ophélie says, “Daddy, Michel had a nightmare and wet the bed. He wants Papa.”

Bitty sighs theatrically and, though Jack can’t see it, presumably pinches the bridge of his nose. “Couldn’t have been five minutes ago, could it,” he says to the room at large.

“Daddy!” Ophélie calls. 

“Don’t you open that door,” Bitty says loudly back to her; Jack flinches away from the authority in his voice, which in Jack’s case always means he’s done something wrong. “I’ll come out in a second.”

“What about Papa?” Ophélie asks. 

“What about Papa,” Bitty mutters. He gets off of Jack, meanly twisting Jack’s now-insistent dick as he does so. “I don’t think Papa is going anywhere, do you?” He pulls the pillow off of Jack’s face and looking down at him with a sneer. Jack shakes his head. “I don’t think so, either,” Bitty says, and shoves the pillow back down to cover Jack’s open fly. “Don’t move, don’t talk, or you know she’ll try to get in here and she’ll see you like this and she’ll think you’re disgusting for the rest of her life, plus we’ll get stuck with all the therapy bills,” Bitty warns Jack. 

Jack nods, mouth firmly closed.

Bitty sighs, pulls his shirt and pants back on, and with a few practiced motions cards his hair back in place. His face is still flushed, but with any luck Ophélie won’t know what that means until she can pay for her own therapy. “Not a peep,” he says, still in charge, and then his whole demeanor changes as he heads for the door. “Hi, honey,” Jack hears him say as he slips through, “let’s go help your brother out, huh?”

Bitty can’t be gone more than fifteen minutes—Michel doesn’t wet the bed too frequently, actually, but Ophélie had done so often enough that Bitty had it down to a science by the time she was in first grade. It’s enough time, nonetheless, for Jack’s body to lose interest, for Jack’s newly loosened muscles to harden back into the stiff frozen place where they spend most of their time. At one point there’s a thump, then little running steps in the hallway—Michel. Fuck. He makes it all the way to the bedroom door and starts hitting it with a fist, crying, “Papa! Papa!” 

Jack can’t do anything even if he wanted to: he’s still cuffed to the bed.

“I don’t think so,” Bitty says, his voice carrying sharply through the door; he must pick Michel up and carry him away, because Michel’s stream of distressed French fades away into the air. Jack can carry Bitty, if he really wants to, which Bitty never asks him to do anymore, but Bitty has never had enough leverage to pick Jack up; Jack wonders, now, idly, what that would be like, to be totally wrapped in Bitty, the rest of the world forced distant. Would it feel like the ice? Would it feel like Bitty cuffing him to the bed? Would it— 

The door opens, and Bitty comes in, hands clearly damp from recent washing and his face in a slight grimace. “I’ve got to read them a story,” he says, and comes around to the bedposts, unlinking first one ankle and then the other. “You might as well get some rest.” 

Jack isn’t able to move at first, whiplash-frustrated, then groaning a little as he starts to draw his stiff legs back together. 

“What, hon,” Bitty says absently as he bundles the cuffs away. 

Jack rubs feeling back into his knees and manages to croak out a “Thanks.”

Bitty looks up, obviously surprised. “Yeah?” he says, the corner of his mouth quirking deeper into his cheek, his eyelashes now paler and shorter but no less beautiful where they surround his huge dark eyes. Jack wonders when he stopped using that brown mascara. “You’re welcome,” he says, gentle, and he comes around to kiss Jack as sweet as pie. “Get yourself ready for bed, okay? You need anything? Water?”

Jack nods. “My pill case?”

“Sure, honey,” Bitty says, and in his practiced way cleans up the room, tucks the pillow back into its case and then under Jack’s head, hands Jack pills and water and a kiss on the forehead before he heads back to tend to their children. 

Sleep is typically evasive, but now Jack feels totally sunken into the bed, a heavy weight at his core keeping him there. His hands and feet are superfluous. His brain is superfluous. He should get undressed—he should brush his teeth—he should take his meds—he should—he should—


	3. 11 MARCH 2039 2:18 AM

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS APPLY.

—“Yeah, Jack, take it—” Jack hears, as he swims back up into consciousness. A series of sensations occur to him: a rocking weight on his stomach, then Bitty’s hovering presence above him, then the insistent bump of something against his sleep-sour mouth. Oh; oh. He’s been mostly undressed, his socks and boxers still on. “Take it,” Bitty says, coming just as Jack starts thinking about officially waking up, though that would mean he’d have to get involved. Luckily Bitty doesn’t notice or get any come in his eyes.


	4. 11 MARCH 2039

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) WARNINGS continue to apply. 
> 
> 2) On that note...when I started writing this story, I was working for a low-key corporate cult, I was in a regrettably combative roommate situation, and I had just lost several relatives to addiction. My life is a lot more relaxed now, and the story seems much, much darker. YIKES! But it's not over yet. 
> 
> 3) I want you all to know I wrote the bit about folding smartphones before all those folding smartphones came out this year! Meanwhile, the AIC isn't neoclassical; it's Beaux-Arts. You can see Marsden Hartley's painting _Madawaska - Acadian Light-Heavy_ and check out the quoted information yourself [on the AIC website](https://www.artic.edu/artworks/70028/madawaska-acadian-light-heavy?artist_ids=Marsden+Hartley). Plus, spot the (pretty obvious) _Goon_ reference!

Jack always gets a fidgety sensation in his stomach when he wakes up the morning of a hockey game, whether he’s playing in it or not. His eyes feel crusty, so he rubs them, then discovers as he scratches at an itchy patch on his forehead. Is his eczema coming back? No––no, that’s not eczema. Upon reflection, it’s about one step removed from hot, so he decides to take a shower in the en suite.

“Hey, hon,” Bitty says when he opens the door, toothbrush clenched between his teeth as he plucks his eyebrows.

“Hi, Bittle.”

“C’mere and let me look at you,” Bitty says, throwing the tweezers and toothbrush to the countertop with a clatter and reaching out his arms; Jack steps into them automatically. He traces his fingers along Jack’s upper lip and then scratching idly at his forehead. “Gotcha good, didn’t I.”

“Yeah,” Jack says.

“Got you marked up good.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You gonna leave it on for me?”

“The kids,” Jack says, and waves vaguely at the shower.

“All right, I guess you’ve got a point.” Bitty sighs and picks a dried white flake off of Jack’s forehead. “Open your mouth.”

Jack doesn’t; he doesn’t want to.

Bitty’s eyes narrow. “Don’t I know you?” he demands. “Don’t I take care of you? Answer me when I talk to you, Jack.”

“Ye-e-es,” Jack grinds out.

“And didn’t you agree to do what I wanted, when you came back from that horrible place three years ago? Didn’t we agree that I always know better?”

“Yes,” Jack has to admit; it’s true. In the world outside of the rink, Jack can’t be trusted to make the right calls, if something small and tempting is already in his hands.

“So _open your mouth_ ,” Bitty snaps. His wrist arches elegantly as he puts the globule in Jack’s mouth. “Now clean yourself up, for Chrissakes. You look a mess.”

Suddenly alone, door closed, Jack feels his face grimace without his permission. His body is always doing that—disrupting his plans, giving him away. The double-headed shower has a complicated handle with two twisting rings and a flick switch, nothing that immediately resolves into a sensible arrangement; the glass sliding door will prevent Jack’s preferred method of turning on the water from outside the tub, letting it run, and getting in only when it has reached an acceptable temperature and pressure, a system that Bitty tuts over (“Think of all the wasted water, Jack, it’s not 2015 anymore”) but that Jack is unable to change except when forced. 

“You need any help in there?” Bitty calls knowingly.

“No!” Jack lies. He considers the options, all of them bad, all of them sure to end in Bitty’s grim, muted fury, before he takes his phone out of his pocket and steps into the shower still fully dressed in yesterday’s clothing. They act as a protective agent. The water turns on easy, already warm as piss, the water beating a perfect cadence against the faux marble tiles. Jack’s pants and shirt cling to his skin along with his creeping sense of shame. Who gets in a shower with all their fucking clothes on? Jack tries to visualize unbuttoning his jeans, stripping off the shirt, but he can’t hold onto the image, too distracted by the increasingly horrible sensation of wet denim. Jack’s jaw creaks and he realizes he’s clenching his teeth after pain shoots back to his ears and his temples. He promised the dentist he would try not to wear his molars down anymore, but here he is, teeth becoming dust, knees giving out so he thunks painfully to the non-slip mat of the shower, his entire body bloated with cortisone and middle age, his face covered in spunk and tears and probably traces of fluoride and calcium that were caked up inside of the shower head— 

“Baby, baby,” Bitty’s saying, “did you take something? Are you okay?” The water shuts off with a squeak from above Jack’s head, far outside of Jack’s field of vision. There’s a warm weight on Jack’s shoulders, probably one of Bitty’s arms. “Jack! Did you take something?”

Jack manages to shake his head, unable to look away from the drain. It’s a perfect circle. Complete in itself. Small. Manageable. If he looks up, he’ll have to see the shower curtain and the shower head, then the fan in the ceiling, the blinds on the window, the street outside— 

“Okay, hon,” Bitty says, encouraging him to stand with little nudges of his elbow to the nape of Jack’s neck, “I believe you. I don’t know where or when you would have gotten a hand on anything, anyway,” he finishes, mostly to himself. 

Bitty lifts Jack’s arms and pulls off the shirt, carefully strips off Jack’s slacks, wincing and apologizing when the wet zipper catches on Jack’s pubic hair and pulls out several strands. “Baby, come on, lift that leg,” he says. When Jack doesn’t respond, Bitty backs up, assesses the situation, and says, “You embarrassed?”

Jack shrugs roughly.

“No? Then what’s up? You worried you might lose your balance? Oh, honey, here.” Bitty takes one of Jack’s arms and puts it up on the built-in rail, then puts the other on his shoulder. “Can you lift your foot now?”

Jack can, and does. Bitty gently strips him of his pants, boxers, socks, patting Jack’s insteps. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Jack notices that Bitty is naked again. “Look how great those pedicures are treating you.” Without a textilexoskeleton, the water feels fresher, and less likely to stain him with calcic streaks. Bitty unwraps a little hotel soap and punctures open a little hotel shampoo, letting loose an androgynously sharp scent somewhere between lemon and rosemary. His hands rub through Jack’s hair in their capable way, a trail of small circles that Jack knows are supposed to stimulate hair growth. Jack closes his eyes under the ministrations. Leave the drain—laisse-le. 

“Nice and clean,” Bitty declares him, and then, somehow in one sinuous gesture, turns off the tap, wraps Jack in a huge white hotel towel, and shuffles him back into the bedroom. Bitty’s clothes are still laid out on the bed, and he hands Jack a pair of boxer briefs, a cotton undershirt, navy pants of an indeterminate but incredibly crisp fabric blend that Jack bought in a thrift store three years ago and that Bitty usually tries to throw out at least once a month, all things Jack can put on without Bitty’s help and without forcing himself into an untenable texture.

He finds himself a shirt and tugs it on just as Bitty asks, “Presentable?” The sound of his voice snaps the rest of the bedroom into focus, including the fact that Ophélie has been knocking on their door at increasing intervals for the last twenty minutes. Jack doesn’t know the answer to Bitty’s question, so he spreads his arms and offers himself: in memoriam, in effigy, whatever. “Yeah, presentable,” Bitty concludes. “Let’s go see the little monsters.”

The itinerary for the morning had initially included breakfast out, but Bitty pops a piece of bread in each kid’s mouth plus apples all around and calls it acceptable. Who is Jack to argue? He once read in an article that wheat, ground into flour and leavened, is almost nutritionally self-sufficient; bread is what allowed his ancestors to survive harsh winters and ocean voyages, not to mention the British. 

The El is exactly the same as it was yesterday: the joy of public transit. Predictable to a fault, barring the inevitable passenger fatalities and signal errors. Before the kids, during the sour lemon-wash of summer, Jack used to leave in the middle of the night to take Amtrak all the way down to Philadelphia. Typically he’d come back to himself while somewhere embarrassing, like at the urinal with his dick in his hand or crouched on a bench with his hands over his face. Somehow no one ever recognized him, or if they did at least they weren’t Flyers’ fans, who probably would have Twittered his photo to Deadspin before jumping him and pulling out as many teeth as they could reach. 

He’d walk over to one of the supernaturally intuitive Amtrak machines, which would in essence smell his pheromones and suggest a return trip to Providence, but the upfront wallet gauge of a same-day Amtrak ticket was steep, even for someone who’d been making several million a year since his mid-twenties. He always ended up confusing some poor woman behind the ticket counter, then taking commuter trains as far north as he could go, the SEPTA to Trenton, NJTransit to New York, MetroNorth to Waterbury. After the third time, Bitty stopped picking Jack up; after the sixth, Bitty stopped picking the phone up. Once he’d spent hundreds of dollars and a miserable three hours in a jerky self-driving Uber, Jack learned to backtrack to New Haven and then take the NorthEast Regional up the coast.

“Hey, check it out,” Bitty says, nudging Jack back into the present, where his children are getting dirty looks from various slumped figures. Jack follows Bitty’s helpful gesture out the window, greeted by light gleaming off variously shaped glass and steel buildings, some close enough that Jack feels like he can peer right into other people’s offices and living rooms. “Looks like those photos you used to take on the road, right?”

Magically, it does. Bitty squeezes Jack’s shoulder. The world tilts a little, though not unpleasantly: an anchor, pulled up long ago, lowered a few inches back into icy waters. 

Bitty collects the children from their feral stances—Ophélie standing on the seat, Michel crouched in the Godforsaken filth underneath—and sticks Michel’s hand in Jack’s before ushering them all back into the fray of the city. “Come on, kids.”

The walk is longer than it should be, the air cold and weirdly still. After a while, Jack starts to think they’ve taken a wrong turn, not that Bitty will allow any of them to question their path. Bitty always refuses to look at a map on the street, God knows why since he’d look like any generic businessman simply unfolding his cellphone to its larger screen. It must be leftover training from their analogue childhoods. 

Michel has started to make wounded grunts with every step by the time he tugs at Jack’s sleeve and points at a sign which suggests they should head back the way they came. Curious. No one is officially sure if Michel can read. He becomes hysterically combative whenever someone tries to test him on it, or really on anything. “You want to tell Daddy?” Jack asks; Michel, predictably, shakes his head. Jack casts around for Ophélie, but she’s even farther ahead than Bitty is. 

“Bits,” Jack says in defeat. Bitty doesn’t hear. “Bitty!” 

“What,” Bitty snaps, barely turning his head. Jack can’t blame him. He has to keep an eye on Ophélie, an explorer since birth. God, is she the bravest person in the family? Jack manages to explain about the sign. “Excuse me?” Bitty huffs, obviously offended, then has to run and grab Ophélie before she leaps into an unmarked van or gets run over by a bus or something. He returns, Ophélie dragging her little rubber-soled Mary Janes into the sidewalk, and glares up at the sign. “When were you going to tell me about this?” 

“Michel noticed,” Jack says, wondering if this will get him out of trouble. He can’t tell from the look on Bitty’s face.

Several annoyed huffs later they finally get there: the Art Institute is a huge, weathered building with patinated lions on either end of the main staircase. The kids both stare open-mouthed. The Providence Children’s Museum might be the only place in the universe that Michel genuinely likes besides his bedroom, at least as long as it’s not too crowded, but it doesn’t wear its history so obviously. Jack takes the opportunity to explain neoclassical architecture while they wait in line to buy tickets.

“But there aren’t any columns in _here_ ,” Ophélie complains, waving a hand at the sensible flooring and the white walls. 

“It’s been renovated, obviously, honey, we wouldn’t want that limestone to drip all over us!” 

Jack downloaded an audio tour onto his watch in preparation; he usually keeps his miniature earphones in when they’re going any place that’s likely to hold more than fifty loud, well-meaning tourists at once. He tunes in and out as they wander through the Ancient Egyptian collection, the Impressionists, Ophélie asking Bitty a thousand questions that Bitty can’t remember the answer to. Jack doesn’t want to intrude on their father-daughter time, even though Jack is, after all, the one who’s spent twenty years behind a camera. He keeps meaning to set up a website so he can sell some of his better shots, but the interface is always overwhelming and he’s never managed to do more than type Jack Zimmermann’s Photos into a page wizard’s title bar before he has to shut off the tablet and go outside. The white light of the museum reminds him of the sunlight filtering through winter-bare trees in College Hill, where his favorite walk takes him past the Athenaeum. 

They’re onto the Americans when Jack glances into a corner and finds himself transfixed. He floats over towards the painting, vaguely aware that Bitty and the kids aren’t following. They shouldn’t follow. The world has narrowed for Jack and Jack alone into a red canvas and a broad dark-haired man limned by some uncertain, worshipful light source. His pubic hair is thick and dark, his chest furred, his nipples erect and weirdly luminescent; he looks like the hairy lunks in the porn Jack used to sneak on the family computer at two in the morning, back when he was in eighth grade and thought he’d grow out of wanting it with enough exposure. 

“...painting was offered to the museum in the 1960s, but the homoerotic overtones were considered too controversial...” says the audio tour in his ear.

The man’s heavy eyelids almost seem to blink at Jack. Il était acadien, according to the painting’s informational label. Un boxeur. The thick cuts of muscle at the man’s hips look familiar enough to slap with a towel. Jack had seen men like him choke a thousand twinks, or pull their hair so hard he’d thought it would rip out of their skulls. 

“...his body is so fine and dear I could work almost without end from him…” the audio tour continued.

The dark line delineating the man’s hip from his leg has been illuminated with a fine blue streak, as if the artist couldn’t let himself look long enough at the model to separate him from the painting. Or maybe that’s how real artists see the world, through the filter of the work they will create. Jack takes photos but the only real thing he has ever been, despite his many attempts, is un hockeyeur. 

Jack’s finger reaches out to touch a nipple. The paint feels plasticky underneath his thumb. He punches through the canvas. His hand rips past the wooden frame––he squeezes inside the boxer’s chest––a squirmy wet mass––

“Jack!” 

Oh. His hand isn’t doing anything but grasping weakly at the air in front of him. Bitty’s hand is so tight on Jack’s shoulder that Jack distantly regrets making him do all those finger exercises in college. Bitty had laughed when Jack handed him the little spring-loaded device for guitarists. “Really, this is gonna make me a hockey star?” he’d said in that arch way he’d had back then, his twang deepening for effect but not in anger. Jack wasn’t sure the last time he’d heard Bitty use that tone of voice. Certainly before Silver Lake. Bitty had been cute, Jack realizes, just as Bitty grabs Jack’s wrist and stage whispers, “You’re embarrassing us,” although Michel and Ophélie are off god knows where paying no attention to Jack at all, which is in all honesty Jack’s preferred state of affairs. “Come on, stop staring at that stupid painting and join the rest of your family.”

Jack lets himself be led away and wonders what Bitty doesn’t like about le boxeur. He’s handsome, isn’t he? He doesn’t look so different from Jack, back when Jack was twenty years old and thought he’d be able to sculpt his abs forever if he followed the rules scrupulously enough. Certainly Bitty had liked Jack then: they had liked each other so much it was embarrassing, but they hadn’t been embarrassed by it, or anyway Jack hadn’t. He stole Bitty’s shorts whenever he could and sent as many roses as his credit limit would allow. But––the memory stretches out and settles––Bitty hadn’t liked the roses, actually, had he? 

The museum warps around Jack’s safe passage behind the familiar back of Bitty’s head. If Jack looks away from Bitty’s well-hidden grays, something disastrous could happen: the world could end; some painted 19th century general could come alive and slaughter everyone in the museum; someone could see him. Jack fumbles to find the frozen pond, but he keeps getting distracted by the undulating walls of the museum and it refuses to manifest. A thread of panic creeps up his throat and ties itself around his uvula. The knot stings. What would his therapist say? _Okay_ , he imagines in her deep calm voice, _this sounds like a GCP problem to me, Jack. Let’s try to recognize what’s happening. Do you think you might be globalizing, catastrophizing, and/or perseverating?_ He can’t think about the answer. They’re moving too fast. _What’s the worst that could happen?_ he imagines his mother asking him instead, as she did every morning between the ages of ten and sixteen, and in every phone call afterwards. The answer to this question comes more easily. A Deadspin headline, probably. No one recognizes Jack anymore, though. His second stint in rehab didn’t get a lot of traction. Maybe that was Bitty managing his affairs.

Oh, Jack realizes, he’s been panicking about the wrong thing. The worst thing that could happen is that Bitty turns around. What if Bitty sees?

One of the kids tugs on his sleeve, but it’s too dangerous to look down. They float back through a large white hallway. Jack sees everything out of the corners of his eyes. 

Against Bitty’s hair le boxeur shimmers in apparition. Jack inspects him. What’s embarrassing? Jack tries to imagine him through Bitty’s eyes. Heavy muscle, though Bitty has always seemed to like that. Dark thick hair; Bitty likes that too. His stance is a little cocky, maybe. Is the flat expression on his face neutral or combative? This is the kind of question Jack has been unable to answer his whole life. Again he thinks about the illuminated nipple, glowing and erect. Is it le boxeur Bitty doesn’t like, or the artist’s obvious hunger for him? 

The light has changed. Without notice le boxeur gives way to a hyperreal Other Jack, mais putain, mais c’est quoi ça? 

“See how it looks like a kidney bean?” he hears Bitty say. The world refocuses. 

“It’s so clean!” Ophélie says, inspecting her teeth. 

Michel as usual is silent. Jack looks away from Other Jack and lands on open-mouthed Michel, who is staring at Other Michel’s strange extended reflection. “En fait elle s’appelle Cloud Gate,” Jack hears himself say. He learned this during his research into Chicago’s important landmarks, so that he and Bitty could give their children a culturally significant experience. His own parents used to do this, or more correctly his mother; during his father’s protracted absences, she’d bring him to cafés, films, art galleries, used bookstores. “Isn’t this nice?” she’d ask. Yes, but it had never been hockey.

“They clean it twice a day, or more,” Bitty tells Ophélie. Evidently he has done his own research. “Can you imagine if y’all cleaned your rooms that often?” 

“Je refuse,” says Ophélie in her flattest American accent. “Can we take a selfie?”

Bitty finds their children’s interest in their own images to be gauche. Vacations are apparently an exception to this rule, though, since he nods indulgently. “Jack?”

Jack takes out his phone. “Smile.”

“Are you serious right now?” Bitty hisses, snatching the phone away. Michel reaches for himself, but doesn’t touch the Bean or its weird impossible surface. Jack imagines touching it and his heart curdles. “Obviously you have to be in the photo, Jack. Go ask that lady to take our photo or something. You know, as a family.”

Jack peers over at the lady, who seems fine: she’s got long curly hair, she’s middle-aged––no, wait; Jack is middle-aged; she must count as old––and she’s wearing a straw hat. He tries to take a step. It doesn’t work. He massages his hip, which has been locking up more often the closer to fifty he gets. Still, no.

Ophélie skips in front of him and walks straight up to the woman. Jack can’t hear what either one says; the woman smiles the way adults often smile at Ophélie, charmed by her, maybe a little worried about her, too. She’s small for her age, and independent besides. On one of her report cards last year, her teacher commented, Precocious. A familiar label––though in Ophélie’s case it seems to mean that she talks too much. No one has ever said that about Jack. Bitty grabs Jack and Michel and they all four go through the motions, please Michel won’t you smile, please, okay, well, everyone else look at the camera, let’s not keep this kind lady waiting, y’all, oh thank you so much, yes, you have a good vacation yourself. 

“There,” says Bitty, satisfied, showing Jack a picture: all their eyes are open, and Michel is looking off to the side rather than the ground. “We can share at least one photo from this week!”

They have very few family photos, considering how frequently both of them pull out a phone and snap (Bitty has thousands—plates of food, their children; Jack has thousands too—mostly geese). Idly Jack wonders when they stopped taking pictures of each other. Was it before the kids? Before the wedding? Surely after the wedding, at least. 

For much of Jack’s life, his memory was so razor sharp that he cut himself on it. Hence benzodiazepine: the Platonic ideal of a blunting instrument. Now Jack’s careful, constantly-monitored cocktail of psychotropic drugs are supposed to do the same thing, except in a way his psychiatrist thinks looks better on paper: “There’s your public history to consider, Jack,” the psychiatrist said, like Jack had even crushed up and snorted any of his pills since his first round in rehab, decades ago. One time Jack made the mistake of looking up interactions between all his medications and told his therapist about what he’d found, how nervous it made him. An Rx of Damocles. “Why don’t you tell your psychiatrist?” his therapist had said, and they’d practiced, but as usual his psychiatrist had nodded a lot and then given him the same list of prescriptions as always, despite the fact that, even in conjunction, none of it works as well as a single Xanax ever did. As Bitty does what he does best and ushers the family through its daily rituals—dinner, minor arguments, checking that the tickets to the game are still in Jack’s breast pocket by abruptly shoving his hand inside Jack’s coat–—Jack wonders what the big deal is about a fucking Xanax addiction, anyway, if all he was using it for was to get out of the fucking house. 

Jack is shocked to feel a stab of hot anger spike behind his left temple. 

“Honey, you okay?” Bitty asks, and Jack turns to answer before realizing that Bitty is talking to Ophélie, who is watching Jack with wide, grave eyes. Jack tries to meet her eyes and fails, despite his best effort. Like so many things, the rough scrape of her gaze is unbearable. 

“Yeah, yes, of course,” Ophélie says, the little muscles in her jaw working. Precocious; yes. The hot throb of Jack’s anger makes him want to shrink her into a little package he can carry in his palms and protect, so she never has to look like she looks right now, much older than nine and world-weary. But obviously that wouldn’t help. Jack has made everyone he’s ever met make that exact facial expression and he’s never figured out what to do about it. 

“We’re almost there,” Bitty promises, one hand on Michel’s head, the other holding onto Ophélie’s hand. They make, as they always have, a complete unit. 

Wait, wait; Jack has learned through dull repetition that when he starts imagining their family without him in it, he is, if obliquely, engaging in self-destructive ideation. He dutifully calls up the frozen pond and imagines the muscles around his eye releasing their collective and individual tensions. Resentment slides thickly between his throat and his lungs. Bitty never has to do this stuff, or anyway if he does he’s never told Jack about it, whereas Bitty knows every humiliating way Jack’s ever had to claw himself back from the brink. Bitty even knows all the different brinks Jack’s found himself staring down. What has Bitty faced, since their checking practices all those years ago? Mostly Jack. But no. That’s self-destructive, again. 

Christ. Keeping yourself alive is exhausting.

But somehow, while Jack was distracted by convincing himself once again not to jump into traffic, Bitty’s gotten them to United Center, which, sure, hasn’t been renovated in thirty years, as Bitty remarks acidly when they file into their seats, but which at least hasn’t been snapped up by some corporation that would change the name or the vantage points Jack has come to know. And at least there’s hockey! At least there’s watching Ophélie’s gleaming interest, her laser focus on the puck, the way she reacts with whole-body to every good slapshot! At least there’s Michel staring open-mouthed when Glatt (Blackhawks, 24, managed to get called up from juniors at the end of last season and just now hitting his stride) hauls off on Rhea (Blues, 37, an old school enforcer who Jack personally thinks should have retired at least three years ago) and sends him sprawling back like this is still 2015 and the NHL doesn’t believe in concussions yet! 

Next to Jack, Bitty flinches and covers Michel’s eyes with his hands, which seems excessive to Jack since there’s no blood splattered on the ice. On the other hand, Michel is five and an unusually sensitive child. Jack tries to pinpoint the first time he saw something brutal—someone’s teeth getting knocked out, or a sliced Achilles tendon—and finds he can’t remember that far back. 

“He’s okay, right, Papa?” Ophélie says, tugging at Jack’s sleeve. 

“Of course, of course,” Jack says, because Rhea’s a tough old guy. “See, look, he’s not getting carried off in a stretcher. He’s probably fine.” 

Beside him, Bitty mutters, “Some standards you have there, hon,” but Jack doesn’t hold it against him or anything, given Bitty’s long record of conscientious objection as far as hits on the ice are concerned.

The game is slow by Jack’s internal speedometer (and Jack spent his childhood clenching his fists at the Habs’ exceptionally dead puck as they lost in the quarterfinals or failed to qualify over and over again, so that’s saying something) so neither he nor Bitty nor frankly Ophélie has a good excuse for failing to notice that Michel totally loses it sometime between Rhea gets ushered off the ice and the beginning of the third period. But none of them notices until a thin, wretched whine twines its way up into Jack’s ear, and he looks down to see that Michel’s hiding his face in his hands and breathing wetly into his wrists like some kind of rabid animal.

“Bitty—” Jack says, but Michel moans louder at that. For once, Jack’s parental instincts don’t feel paralyzed and drowning under two inches of frozen pond, and he knows exactly what Michel means: Papa! Papa! So he stands up and reaches for Michel, letting his hands hover above Michel’s arms without touching him, shoving his back between Michel’s face and the bright reflective light of the ice, the rustling, snorting, screaming beast of the crowd. 

“Aw, sit down, man,” says one of the assholes further up in the section. 

Jack picked these seats in the lower level because in his practiced opinion they offer the best view in the arena, but now he regrets it: Michel and Ophélie are barely even tall enough to see from up here, anyway. Jack can’t begin to imagine how to explain the whole Michel situation, so he ignores the asshole’s increased rumbling and focuses on Michel’s little form, his arms and legs all crumpled in defeat.

“Seriously, come on, man, we all paid through the nose for these seats,” says the asshole.

“You can just watch your tone, sir,” Bitty says, haughty, although he follows it up by hissing to Jack, “Come on, let’s get him out of here.” 

But Jack can tell, although he couldn’t explain how, that Michel isn’t ready for someone to touch him—that if Jack grabs him now, Michel will be shut down for the rest of the night, maybe even until they get back to Providence. “I can’t,” he says.

“Oh, come on, Jack, don’t let him bully you with a tantrum. He’s five, it’s time he started outgrowing this.” 

“I can’t,” Jack repeats, ragged. 

“Can you please for the love of Christ himself sit down?” the asshole roars, distantly, beyond the safe wall Jack has constructed with his shoulders. A fragment of a sense memory floats into the back of his mind—

“What, do you want us to refund your ticket?” Bitty says, in a voice so disdainful it’s almost physically cutting.

—of his own father carrying him in some distant, unplaceable past, Jack’s head tucked into his father’s neck. 

“Calm down, can’t you see they have a weirdo kid?” the man’s girlfriend whispers. There’s a familiar sound of a thwap, like the sound his mother used to make when she hit his father on the shoulder for saying something embarrassing. Bitty sniffs loudly.

“T’es prêt à partir?” Jack offers to Michel, at last, and Michel lets out a long breath before nodding, looking at his own belly, but he lifts his arms enough that Jack can hook his hands into Michel’s little armpits and pick him up. He’s getting tall already; his legs swing almost to Jack’s knees. Ophélie obediently sticks her hand in Bitty’s without being asked and Bitty leads them out, Michel curling himself up in knots, Ophélie tucked between Jack and Bitty, Jack ducking down behind Bitty’s serene golden aura as he sails them out, down, and into the parking lot. 

“The train,” Jack says, feeling disoriented and subdued, Michel’s eyes closed tight against his chest. 

“Yeah, no, I’m calling an Uber,” Bitty says, and Jack leans gratefully into him as they wait for the car to take them back home.


End file.
